New Brunswick group hopes to foster pride in basketball’s Canadian roots

A small town in New Brunswick is rallying to turn the world’s oldest basketball court into a museum and a proud symbol of Canada’s legacy in the sport.

The rise in patriotism prompted by the U.S. president is renewing focus on everything Canada has given the world, and a small New Brunswick mill town wants people to know the sport of basketball belongs on that list.

A brick building nestled between an empty lot and a sports bar in St. Stephen, N.B., is claimed to house the world’s oldest surviving basketball court, with records of a game being played there on Oct. 17, 1893.

For years, locals have been trying to get the site properly recognized and converted into a museum, and now there is hope that the surge in Canadian pride will make the dream a reality. It is time, they say, for Canadians to have a new shrine to the sport invented by Canadian-born James Naismith while he was an instructor at the YMCA Training School in Springfield, Mass.

“A Canadian invented the game, and the world’s oldest court where the game was first played in Canada is sitting in St. Stephen, N.B.,” said Tom Liston, a transplanted New Brunswicker who works as a tech investor in Toronto. “I think people are starting to think about that fact more and more.”

It was Lyman Archibald, a Nova Scotia-born protege of Naismith, who brought the sport to St. Stephen when he was assigned to be director of the local YMCA. Over the years, the building was used as a recruiting centre during the First World War, a dance hall, a meeting place for the Oddfellows Society and the first pharmacy in the province.

In 2010, a fire swept through the building, and the cleanup uncovered the original hardwood gymnasium floor, which had been hidden under carpet. The “world’s oldest” status has been disputed, with some historians saying the Paris YMCA has the oldest basketball court in its original state, although the first game documented there was two months after Archibald imported basketball to Canada.

Today, a fruit basket hangs from one wall, a reminder of the original baskets used by Naismith, but it has been more than a century since the gym’s birch floor was used for a game. The powder-blue paint on the walls is peeling, and during a recent visit a smoke alarm was repeatedly chirping.

Liston belongs to a non-profit group, Canada 1st Basketball, that is hoping to transform the building into what it calls an “experience centre” that would feature a hall of fame, interactive displays and a theatre. It would also host events and youth programming.